There are countless jokes about modern art being ridiculously boring and about people only being into it to distinguish themselves from the unrefined, who expect from art what hungry people expect from food. When people keep making fun of you, you can pretend not to listen, or you can start making fun of yourself. But in both cases, your stance is a reactive one. To undermine the twitting, you better create some ambiguity: are you really being serious with that boring stuff, or are you just making fun of yourself? Since the breakthrough of Marcel Duchamp, most art that is canonically understood as good is fueled by such an ambiguity. The dubious balance between serious and silly itself became a predictable formula. Which made it tempting for some artists to stand out by insisting on being boringly meaningful or boringly silly. In those cases, it’s less a reaction to outsiders making fun of them than to the well-balanced ambiguity of the other artists. The works of the British artists John Wood and Paul Harrison play on the boringly silly side. Their current show at von Bartha, “Some things are undesigned,” is no exception: a painting with the words “LEFT AND RIGHT” in one …